From books to infrastructure

Most people think of Amazon as little more than an online bookstore, but it could be one of the defining forces of 21st–century life—an
algorithmically managed infrastructure company that has single–handedly rewritten the publishing industry's rulebook.

Until a couple of years ago, it would have been
impossible to believe, listening to any literature
professional, that publishing was anything
other than a pen, ink and paper business. Sure,
the typewriter, complete with ashtray and
the clacking of keys, is romanticised, but it is
rarely given an active role. The work remains
"in manuscript" until it appears, as if by magic,
printed onto paper and available in the nearest
bookshop, transmogrified by the sheer romance of
literature itself.

Of course, this is pure fantasy. For almost two
decades, since the advent of desktop publishing,
the publishing process has been almost entirely
digital, only assuming a physical form at the very
last stage: in the reader's hands. Most novels —
not to mention every other type of book — are
written — typed — onto electronic keyboards,
and stored, transmitted, edited, formatted, set
and distributed digitally. An increasing amount
of the printing itself is digital too, as complex
lithographic processes give way to digital
presses allowing shorter runs and more efficient
production. What then of reading, the last outpost
of the physical?

Electronic books have been around for some time,
and you can pick your genesis myth, although
the most persuasive is the moment when
Michael S. Hart, a graduate student with a new
network account at the University of Illinois,
decided to type up the American Declaration of
Independence,
it being the Fourth of July, 1971,
and make it available for public download. In
the process he created the first e-book, and went
on to found Project Gutenberg
, the first digital
library, and fought a lifelong campaign for higher
literacy rates.

Top: All Amazon lives: From its birth in July 1994 to the recent projects to raise the Apollo 11’s engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Infographic by Simone Trotti. Above: History of Kindle. Infographic by Simone Trotti

The first e-book readers, with first-gen names
like SoftBook, Cybook and Rocket, appeared in
1998, along with the first websites offering paid
downloads of electronic texts (Gutenberg's free
library had reached 1,000 titles 2 years earlier).
Although surprisingly similar in form to the
e-book readers we know today, their low storage
(1,500 pages!) and poor connectivity resulted in
poor sales, bankruptcy and administration. This in
turn left deep scars on the traditional publishing
industry which had, in a surprising number of
cases, spent time and money preparing their titles
for the new platforms. The industry's subsequent
conclusion that e-books were at best a distraction
and at worse a mendacious trick by the technology
industries has hampered it ever since — and may
yet be its downfall.

Left, Device ownership in the US. Right, Book formats read in the US. Source: Pew Research Center. Infographic by Simone Trotti

Meanwhile, in Seattle, a different kind of
technology company had been quietly establishing
itself. Amazon.com
, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1995,
set out to be the world's largest bookstore, but
turned out to be far more than that. The disparity
between Amazon's vision of the future of books
and that of the traditional industry cannot be
overstated; Barnes & Noble
even took the upstart
to court in 1997 over its "world's largest" claim:
"[It] isn't a bookstore at all. It's a book broker,"
carped the bricks and mortar.

If the inventory software fails, mere people are adrift among millions of scattered flotsam

Kindle’s predecessors: According to Italy’s la Repubblica newspaper, the Incipit prototype was the first e-reader and was submitted as a degree thesis at Milan Polytechnic. The Rocket eBook and the SoftBook Reader (with leather cover) were the first e-readers to be launched on the market, while the Sony LIBRIé was the first e-reader to use e-ink. Infographic by Simone Trotti

The open secret about Amazon is that it's not a
book company, or a retail company, or an Internet
company; it's an infrastructure company. Its
warehousing and distribution services outstrip
most other retailers, and in many nations,
particularly in Europe, their warehouses are the
largest in the country. From the outset, Amazon
didn't just buy up other book retailers and
distributors; it acquired statisticians, analytics,
data miners and hardware technicians. In 2006, it
launched Amazon Web Services, making not just
goods but its own digital infrastructure — virtually
limitless data storage and supercomputer-scale
processing — available to anyone, from physical
locations in the us, Europe and Asia. This focus on
infrastructure was to carry through to Amazon's
signature product: the Kindle
.

How electronic ink works. Infographic by Simone Trotti

The Kindle is, physically, a modest product. Its
e-ink screen lacks the flashiness of its tablet
rivals. It connects to the Internet via the
"Whispernet
", far below the speeds to which
we are becoming accustomed. It is white, grey
or, at a push, grey-black, and definitely plastic.
Its low-tech appearance also sidesteps many
of the controversies of electronic reading: slow
refresh rates keep it from the skeuomorphism of
Apple iBooks' page-flip animations; its reduced
connectivity discourages the distraction of social
services. It is not an iPad, and it turns this to its
advantage. Optimised for reading, the dedicated
ereader suffers from none of the niggles of the
jack-of-all-trades tablet computer. It is robust
and slips easily into a bag or pocket without the
protective/fetishistic coverings of more expensive
technologies. As technology writer Tom Armitage
has noted, the Kindle "is a device that always
seems content with itself. Just sitting there, not
caring if you pick it up or not. Like a book."

E-book vs. e-reader: Not every e-reader supports all the e-book formats available on the market. The Nook by Barnes & Noble, for example, does not read Amazon formats, and Kindle does not read e-Pub, the “free and open” format. Below is a guide to help you find your way around. Infographic by Simone Trotti

Amazon has sold millions of Kindles since the
device's launch in 2007, making it its own bestselling
product. In 2010, Amazon claimed that
Kindle books were outselling paper books in its
own marketplace — a figure to take with a pinch of
salt with respect to pricing and Amazon's own way
with figures, but nevertheless compelling.
The standard response to electronic reading has
always been an emotional one, and a curiously
physical one. Vocal readers have long decried
"reading from the screen", as if letters come
in different flavours depending upon their
illumination. They have appealed to the tactility
of paper and the smell of the book, as if stories
are defined by their containers. As if, indeed,
books should be judged by their covers. And yet
it is the most serious readers who have taken to
ereaders first, and to the Kindle overwhelmingly.

The average e-reader owner: During the 2011 Christmas holidays there was an unprecedented rush to buy e-readers. Infographic by Simone Trotti

Even technophobic publishers themselves, it
should be noted, were among the first adopters,
replacing their stacks of printed manuscripts for
assessment with slim devices, even as they refused
to distribute the finished articles in electronic
formats and professed their belief in a paper future.

More nuanced dissent would penetrate further:
into Amazon's terms of service, into their ringfencing
of the social experience of their readers,
into their aggressive pricing and discounting
strategies. The Kindle allows these things by
directly connecting reader and marketplace, to
the exclusion of all other voices. Literary Jesuits,
Amazon knows that once a reader has a Kindle
in their hands, they are unlikely to go anywhere
else for books.

World map showing the Amazon infrastructure, with depots, warehouses, headquarters, call centres and software development centres. Infographic by Simone Trotti

The great fear of the Internet is that we will be
washed away in a tide of information, that the
sheer scale of everything will overwhelm us, and
that that everything is inferior, condemning us to
wallow in the mud at the foot of an ever-receding
Parnassus. And yet one of the many things the
Internet has taught us is that surface quality of
media comes a poor second to access, whether it's
typographically inhibited self-published fan fiction
or barely discernible YouTube camera-phone films.

What makes the Kindle unique is what makes
Amazon unique: its physical presence is a mere
avatar for a stream of digital services. In the spirit
of its parent, it is more infrastructure than device.
And it is as infrastructure that it disrupts, as its
biblioclastic name intends.

The Kindle connects the reader to a carefully,
algorithmically managed world, a code/space
that affects reader and reading, and ultimately
writing and literature. Code/spaces, as defined
by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, are physical
spaces in which use of the space is contingent
upon software. For example, an airport check-in.
Software facilitates the registration and flow of
people, producing the check-in space; should the
software fail, the space itself crashes, becoming a
busy, angry and ultimately pointless waiting room.

Another example is provided by the warehouses
of Amazon itself, which long ago grew to such
levels of complexity that they require algorithmic
management. Objects placed within them conform
not to any human taxonomy — books alphabetised
by author here, music CDs in another corner, DVDs
over there — but to a mathematical equation, a
computation of frequency that ensures goods are
stored as close as possible to multiple sites of use
and packaging. As a result, only an augmented
human can find stock in its millions of seemingly
randomly distributed square feet; if the inventory
software fails, mere people are adrift among
millions of scattered flotsam.

With regards to literature and reading, this
increasing dehumanisation of information
space points to the key question articulated by
information studies professor Philip Agre: "Is a
digital library a machine or an institution?" What
Barnes & Noble said about Amazon's original book
business is true of their current incarnation:
Amazon is not so much a bookstore as a database,
a vast, unknowable system, not dissimilar in that
way from the Internet itself. And perhaps that
is what Amazon and the Kindle ecosystem best
represents, an Internet for the incurious; broad
enough to appear impartial and unthreatening,
controlled just enough not to break, or frighten
the horses. If the Kindle restricts most of its
users to content approved by Amazon — and it
does — and if it walls up the reading experience
and claims ownership over our highlights
and bookmarks — and it does that too — is that
forgivable in return for apparent access to all
books, now, right now, forever? To what extent
are we prepared to have our cultural experiences
mediated or even controlled by technology? The
answer, it increasingly appears, is quite a lot, and
the Kindle, for better or worse, is the tool we have
chosen to negotiate for us.